Three systems that all "collect plant data" but answer different questions. Boundaries, handoffs, and how to stop buying two of them for one job.
Factory Software
HMI, historian, batch, OEE, and manufacturing applications.
DDS middleware, real-time profiles, and the ROS-Industrial consortium — a controls engineer's map of the Robot Operating System.
From vibration sensor to work order: sensing, transport, context, models, and the analytics layer where predictions become decisions.
The base standard models anything; companion specs model your industry. How to find, read, and actually use them.
Adapters, agents, and streams — how the open machine-tool connectivity standard works and where it fits beside OPC UA.
What levels 0–4 actually mean for MES integration, B2MML exchanges, and conversations between IT and operations.
Ladder, function block, structured text, and the rest — what each of the five languages is good at and how shops actually mix them.
IndexROS: Robot Operating System (ros.org)
The Robot Operating System project: ROS 2 documentation, middleware (DDS), packages, and the industrial (ROS-Industrial) consortium.
IndexMTConnect: shop-floor equipment connectivity standard (mtconnect.org)
MTConnect Institute: the open, read-only standard for shop-floor device data — adapters, agents, schemas, and companion specs.
IndexAutomationML: vendor-neutral plant engineering data exchange (automationml.org)
AutomationML: the open data format for exchanging plant engineering data between tools (topology, geometry, logic, behavior).
IndexHighByte — Industrial DataOps platform (highbyte.com)
HighByte: Industrial DataOps software for modeling, contextualizing, and governing data from edge to cloud.
Terms in this topic
- CMMS
- Software for maintenance work orders, schedules, and asset history.